Shocking Final Jeopardy round ends well for local man

On Tuesday night at 8 p.m. my roommate, David, began yelling my name from the living room.

Usually, David is sympathetic to my sleep schedule. I have to wake up early to produce The Jason Rantz Show on KTTH every weekday morning, and unfortunately this means I go to bed before Jeopardy airs.

That night, something took place that David thought was so important it was worth waking me up. Honestly, I don’t really blame him.

First I have to set the scene. Just a heads up, in case you’re some kind of weirdo that watches Jeopardy days later, there will be some spoilers.

As always, there were three contestants on the show last night, Manny Abell, Carlo Nobleza Posas and Fran Fried.

Carlo and Fran had a huge advantage over Manny going into the final round, they both had $12,300 to wager while Manny only had $1,000.

This was the Final Jeopardy answer: “It’s the only country that borders both The Caspian Sea and The Persian Gulf.”

Manny bet $999 on his guess “What is Iraq?”

Carlos bet all of his $12,300 on “What is Azerbaijan?”

Finally, Fran also bet it all on “What is Tibet?”

I had no idea what the correct response was, and neither did any of the contestants. Iran was the country Alex Trebek was looking for. If you’re doing the math, Carlo and Fran were left with $0, and Manny won the day with $1.

I hate the phrase “by the skin of your teeth” for two reasons; first, because it doesn’t make sense and teeth don’t have skin, and second, because it creeps me out to think of teeth having skin. In this situation though, I can’t think of a more appropriate idiom.

There are a lot of reasons this is crazy. First of all, it really rarely happens. It only happened one other time in 1993 (I know it happened twice on Celebrity Jeopardy, but I’m considering Celebrity Jeopardy a different thing, don’t @ me).

Another crazy detail: Manny Abell is a naval officer, the last guy to manage a $1 win was Darryl Scott, an officer in the Air Force!

I’ll leave you with one final detail that to me was the most exciting bit of serendipity: Manny is from Lacey, Washington.

Listen, local sports have been kind of a downer very recently. I’m tired of complaining about the Seahawks offensive line woes, the Mariners are perennially terrible, both the Huskies and Cougars lost this weekend and tumbled in the rankings.

This was Manny’s third win in a row (although he only added $1 to his $42,798 total last night). He played again Wednesday night.

The only local competitor I truly trust now to pull out the unlikely win is Manny, and I’m going to continue watching him as long as I can.

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